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How Green Can You Be – Taking Cloth Diapers to the Next Level with: The Used Diaper Company

Infuriating actions by large corporations are often the impetus for new business ventures, including green ones.

When UK mom, Sarah Bennett, potty-trained her two toddlers she decided to sell her pre-owned cloth diapers on E-Bay. She was surprised and annoyed to find that E-bay had changed their policy, refusing to allow their sale and reclassifying them as “adult material”. (Go figure.)

Turning to classified ads, she found them frustrating as many ads were not removed after sale, she had little information about the seller and arranging for pick up and payment was time consuming. And so, she started an auction site for used diapers from her kitchen table. And was an immediate success.

Ms. Bennett, in an e-mail, told me :
We launched Used Nappies (nappy is the British term for diaper!) last April and it’s been more successful than we possibly imagined – over 7000 auctions have completed in the nine months since we launched.

Now Ms Bennett has expanded her service to the United States and launched My Used Diapers. The auction website enables sale of both diapers and diaper covers and uses Paypal to complete transactions. In the first few weeks the site has received over 6000 hits with new users registering every day, though Bennett has had to do some tinkering with the site. Bennett explained:

We’ve found there are some cultural differences in the U.S. with a greater concern of ‘scammers’, so after a customer made a suggestion we have added the ability for customers to import their eBay feedback to give confidence to buyers and sellers.

In the US, close to 20% of all diapering is done with cloth. Moms make the choice primarily for health reasons, cloth diapers tend to be more comfortable for baby and prevent some skin irritation. It’s also considered the more environmentally friendly choice…though that is up for debate. (While disposable diapers go into landfills, cloth diapers use up more natural resources in the laundering process.)

Washable cloth diapers offer parents an alternative to disposables, providing a real opportunity to reduce waste and the impact on the environment. The Real Diaper Association estimate that 27.4 billion disposable diapers are consumed every year in the U.S. with over 92% of all single-use diapers ending up in landfill(s)…

Ms Bennett’s goals however, are more direct; provide a service that parents need.

We’re never going to make our fortune doing this… We just want to make it easy for parents to buy and sell used diapers.

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Comments

That’s too bad that eBay changed their policy. I sold a ton of my used diapers on eBay and it made trying out new kinds way more cost effective.

I will say, however, that when you buy used cloth diapers, it can be hard in terms of knowing what
types of detergent then used and how they cared for them. But I suppose with anything used, you can only take the seller’s word and hope for the best.

I’d check with Green-Mary.com who runs biodegradable events with picnic supplies made of potato derivs and such…she supplied two events we attended recently, the Digital Earth symposium (which I wrote about on Shaping Youth here: http://www.shapingyouth.org/blog/?p=473
And also the Craigs List Nonprofit Bootcamp which was a huge event/undertaking on the ‘all green’ level.

My oldest son is almost three and my youngest is about to turn 2 years old. I’ve used cloth since my first was born. When #2 came along, I had the urge to change things up a bit, and so I tried gDiapers, since they sounded like such a great idea.

I liked the covers, they are very soft, and I liked the fact that they fastened in the back. With that said…

The flushable liner bunched up almost 100% of the time, which made it pretty disgusting when my sons pooped. If you do use the system, make sure you purchase a lot of the plastic liners, because you’ll end up chsnging them quite frequently. Additionally, if I went somewhere without the swishing stick, I ran the risk of clogging the toilet. I overflowed the toilet at my in-laws’ house when I flushed a liner. I tried carrying them around in a wetbag to flush when I got home, but it just didn’t work out.

In the end, gDiapers was a little too labor-intensive for someone with two babies! I went back to “regular” cloth after my trial packs ran out, but I did use their covers over prefold diapers. Good luck! 🙂

Gdiapers also contain sodium polyacrylate, but that’s hard to find on their web site. So, to me, they’re not really green.

Also, I take issue with the idea that cloth uses more resources in laundering. Disposables use a lot of water in their manufacture, too. Then they stick around for hundreds of years after their one use. I still think cloth is the most environmentally responsible option.

[…] as the solution to the poopy diaper conundrum;(disposable diapers are filling up the landfills and cloth diapers uses lots of water) gdiaper is the hybrid of the two. It has the cotton outer pants, with nylon […]

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About Eco Child’s Play

Our ethos is to provide news, information, and opinions on natural, green parenting to help your family live a greener, healthier life! Additionally, we offer personal consulting services to help you achieve your green living goals.

Jennifer is a vegetarian, yoga teacher, gardener, hiker, teacher, and mother that has been living off-the-grid for over 20 years.